A full production of Hamlet, with all the bells and whistles and no cuts, might take anything up to four hours to perform. It is a bold choice, therefore, for the Prague Shakespeare Company and director Dmitry Troyanovsky to try and dash through their Hamlet Redux in just under 60 minutes.
While the ambition of the effort is to be lauded, it turns out that this requires just too much reduction, too much loss to work satisfactorily. Any audience member without prior knowledge of the plot of the Prince of Denmark’s actions (and inaction) after the murder of his father by his uncle Claudius will possibly struggle to keep up. They will certainly get little sense of character or motivation.
With so little connective tissue, the script almost becomes Hamlet bingo, with all of the most quotable lines following one after the other in quick succession, lacking room to breathe or really land with the audience. The rhythm of the speech sometimes feel off kilter, possibly a result of so much of the text being lost. A less savage wielding of the scalpel might have retained a better sense of story and character, while still keeping the running time tight.
Hamlet Redux is a stripped back affair in style as well as content, with minimal props and staging comprised of just a few chairs. The production highlights the artifice at the heart of all theatre, but particularly Hamlet with its play-within-a-play. Hamlet Redux starts with Hamlet quoting ‘the play’s the thing’ before a dumb show enacting the murder of his father.
Hamlet’s soliloquies are sometimes divvied up among the whole cast, who recite them while lined up in front of the audience to hammer home the conceit. The sense of dialogue rather than monologue this creates is interesting, and it serves to democratise Hamlet’s pondering. Presumably the idea is to try and make his words belong to us all, and help us better understand and relate to his state of mind. However, the choice also robs the speeches of some of their power, and means that Fady Demian’s energetic Hamlet remains an unknowable character.
Kevin Hopkins is a pleasingly odious Claudius, smirking with pleasure at his own machinations. Polonius is played with fussy precision by Helga Rogne, constantly jotting things down in a little notebook, a habit that eventually gets him killed by Hamlet. It is a shame the relationship between Polonius and his son Laertes (Charlie Bliwas) is given no room to develop, leaving the latter every bit as much of a cipher as Demian’s Hamlet.
The creators of Hamlet Redux want us to better understand Hamlet the man so that we better understand ourselves, so that we get a better grasp on the central questions of existence. While making Shakespeare shorter can certainly help modern audiences get to grips with sixteenth-century drama (Prague Shakespeare Company also successfully presented Othello at this year’s Fringe in a brisk 75 minutes), in this case they have gone too far. Ultimately, the plot is too rushed for us to get a sense of either the story or the man. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is possible to be too brief.
Performed at C Arts on 16 August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe
11, 13, 15 and 16 August, 20:50
Running time: 1 hour, no interval
Written by William Shakespeare
Adapted by Stephanie Fleischmann and Dmitry Troyanovsky
Directed by Dmitry Troyanovsky
Performed by the Prague Shakespeare Company
Cast: Charlie Bliwas, Fady Demian, Kevin Hopkins, Meg Laskey, Claire Nicholls, Helga Rogne, Brooke Truslow